But we
have never talked about one of the most celebrated and notorious of all the
gunmen, John Wesley Hardin.

John Wesley Hardin

We can
redress that oversight now, though, because I have just re-read a book I bought
in 2008, the one many regard as the definitive biography of the Texas
gunfighter, John Wesley Hardin: Dark
Angel of Texas (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1996) by the El Paso
writer Leon Metz.

Solid, reliable

It is a
curious fact that Americans, then and now, like to elevate to the status of
bold hero men who were psychopaths and serial killers. But they do. And perhaps
not only Americans. If the homicidal man (it’s always a man) in question didn’t
have positive aspects to his character, well, we invent them. That’s how Jesse
James and Billy the Kid became heroes. These men were in fact very unpleasant
murderers, often (in the case of Hardin and James anyway) killing for racist
reasons, in anger, for greed or just because they could. But they become
“social bandits” in the Marxist credo. They help the poor and are protected by
them. Excuses are invented: ‘he was only defending his community against the
grasping railroad company’ was a common one. “He’s a good boy really,” their
mothers say.

The
worst of them, Hardin included, hypocritically put on a mask of virtue to
justify their actions. “I never killed a man who didn’t deserve it,” he said,
as if he were by right an Almighty judge. “I only killed bad men,” he said, as
if that makes it somehow alright.

One of my favorite Dylan albums

As Bob
Dylan sang, on one of his greatest ever albums:

John Wesley Harding
Was a friend to the poor
He trav’led with a gun in ev’ry hand
All along this countryside
He opened many a door
But he was never known
To hurt an honest man

It was
nonsense, of course. Hardin killed plenty of honest men and there is no
evidence whatever that he was “a friend to the poor”. Furthermore, though these appalling gunmen claimed that
they only killed an opponent “in a fair fight” (that excusing all, of course) often
they did no such thing, being perfectly willing to shoot people to death in the
back, from hiding or in any other way they could gain an advantage.

The song
goes on:

’Twas down in Chaynee County
A time they talk about
With his lady by his side
He took a stand
And soon the situation there
Was all but straightened out
For he was always known
To lend a helping hand

All across the telegraph
His name it did resound
But no charge held against him
Could they prove
And there was no man around
Who could track or chain him down
He was never known
To make a foolish move

I don’t know where Chaynee County is and Hardin certainly did not take a
stand with his lady by his side. In fact he was a poor husband and father who
virtually deserted his family. As for “no charge against him could they prove,”
well, he was tried for murder, convicted and spent sixteen years at hard labor
in the penitentiary. Still, it’s pointless criticizing Bob Dylan for historical
inaccuracy! He was singing a great song of his own poetic creation, as if it
were one of the old gunfighter ballads. But it does show the adulation that
Hardin and other serial killers were accorded, and even still are in certain
quarters.

JW Hardin posing in Abilene

Because
he wrote an autobiography, John Wesley Hardin’s history of homicide is better
known than that of most of his contemporaries. However, his own account of his
life was unfinished, rambling, and full of important gaps and prevarications.
We do not know how many people he murdered because he claimed ‘credit’ for some
deaths he did not cause and omitted others which we know he did. Even the
number of victims can be the occasion for a rather morbid interest, the
‘notches on the gun’ syndrome. Mr. Metz keeps a running tally for most of the
book, even though it is a doomed effort because impossible to keep the count
accurate. The most we can say, finally, is that the number of people Hardin
destroyed might have been as “few” as twenty and could have been as many as
fifty. Either way, it is a horrendous total.

Hardin
himself, of course, was finally shot to death in a squalid saloon in El Paso
at the age of 42, and you can’t help but think that it was a fitting end.

John Selman Sr., the man who killed JW Hardin

Part of
the bloodletting came from the feud culture in east Texas where Hardin spent
his youth. In the Reconstruction era many Southerners felt themselves without
the protection of the law. The Texas Rangers, many of whose members had
enlisted to fight for the Confederacy, were disbanded in 1870 and replaced by a
Texas State Police force (1870 – 73), which was hated by many white
ex-Confederates or Confederacy supporters. Some of the police’s members were
black, which in itself was simply unacceptable to Hardin and those like him.
The Rangers were recommissioned in 1873 but under Leander H McNelly were guilty
of ruthlessness, intimidation, inducing confessions by torture and summary
executions. In any case there were rarely more than a hundred of them. In this
climate, it was considered acceptable to “take the law into your own hands” and
if a member of your family or a close friend was slain, you had the perfect
right – indeed, the duty – to avenge that crime and kill the guilty party or
even an innocent member of the guilty party’s entourage.

John
Wesley Hardin was admired by many for killing Union soldiers, Mexican vaqueros,
the “Negro” Mage (Major Holshousen), black state policemen and an Indian. These
people “deserved” it. His dexterity with firearms, especially his ability
to twirl revolvers on his fingers and perform the “border roll”, was also
greatly admired.

Hardin's pistol

Mr. Metz
deals at some length with Hardin’s confrontation with Wild Bill Hickok in
Abilene. Hardin was there having driven a trail herd north at the time that
Hickok was marshal, and Hardin openly flouted the no-gun ordinance and was
allowed by Hickok to get away with it. Whether Hardin got one over on Wild Bill
with a border roll cannot be confirmed but is certainly possible.

Hardin’s
murderous career was in fact relatively short. He killed his first man (as far
as we know) in November 1868, when he was fifteen, and was arrested and
imprisoned in August 1877, so his killing spree lasted nine years. He may have
killed or engineered deaths after his release, in El Paso in 1895, but nothing
is confirmed there.

In some
ways, Metz’s description of Hardin’s last years in El Paso is the most
interesting part of the book, perhaps because the author knows the history of
El Paso so well (he has also written a life of John Selman, who killed Hardin) and
knows the place intimately. Hardin’s final years really come to life.

There
have been plenty of novels featuring John Wesley Hardin. Try, for example,
James Carlos Blake’s The Pistoleer
(Berkley Publishing, 1995), which is of course an imaginative rendering of his
life but is clearly based on such facts as are known. Hardin has also appeared
in movies, played by various actors, but these are miles away from the true
Hardin, sometimes about as far as you can possibly get. The excellent Western
actor John Dehner first played JW Hardin, in The Texas Rangers (the 1951 George Montgomery one), then Rock Hudson in the frankly rather
silly The Lawless Breed in 1953.

Rock

Jack
Elam, no less, was a burlesque JWH in Dirty Dingus Magee
in 1970,

Jack

and David Busse is to play him in the forthcoming The Hard Ride, currently in production. On TV, Richard Webb was
Hardin in the inevitable episode of Stories
of the Century in 1954.

Richard Webb on the trail to Abilene

Of course it was Matt Clark who arrested Hardin, in Abilene, after Hardin had shot and killed 'Marshal Corbin' (no sign of Hickok). When the life of Hardin was so jam-packed with shootings and other crimes, why they had to invent totally new fictional ones is a mystery. Looking back on it, Stories of the Century really was a pretty bad show. And anyway, what are "official" newspaper files?Hardin also appeared in episodes of Judge Roy Bean in 1956 (Lash La Rue!), Studio One in Hollywood in 1957 (Richard Boone, that’s more like
it), The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp
in 1955 and '57 (both played by Phillip Pine), Bronco in 1958 (Scott Marlowe), Tales
of Wells Fargo in 1957 and '58 (Lyle Bettger, who probably caught the charm
and charisma that Hardin was said to have had), James Griffith in an entertaining 1959 episode
of Maverick,

James Griffith in Maverick

Brad Johnson in 1959 in Zane Grey Theatre, Neville Brand (good
old Neville) in Death Valley Days in
1962, Charles Bronson in Vacation
Playhouse in 1965, and Randy Quaid in Streets
of Laredo in 1999.

Metz’s
biography, taken with the autobiography (The
Life of John Wesley Hardin, As Written By Himself, Smith and Moore, Seguin,
Texas, 1896, modern edition with an introduction by Robert G McCubbin, University
of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1961) and the letters (The Letters of John Wesley Hardin, Transcribed and Compiled by Roy
& Jo Ann Stamps, Eakin Press, Austin, Texas, 2001) will give you as
accurate a picture as you are going to get of the life of the criminal John
Wesley Hardin (1853 – 95).

1 comment:

Excellent post -- and agree on the Rock Hudson biopic. Silly stuff, at best. Never heard of the Dylan song; perhaps I shall seek it out. (Though, to my ear, he always sounded like noise and nothing more.) And, of course, the photo of Elam made my day!